GlotSparse Corpus

Collection of news websites in low-resource languages.

• Homepage: homepage
• Repository: github
• Paper: paper
• Point of Contact: amir@cis.lmu.de

These languages are supported:

('azb_Arab', 'South-Azerbaijani_Arab')
('bal_Arab', 'Balochi_Arab')
('brh_Arab', 'Brahui_Arab')
('fat_Latn', 'Fanti_Latn') # aka
('glk_Arab', 'Gilaki_Arab')
('hac_Arab', 'Gurani_Arab')
('kiu_Latn', 'Kirmanjki_Latn') # zza
('sdh_Arab', 'Southern-Kurdish_Arab')
('twi_Latn', 'Twi_Latn') # aka
('uzs_Arab', 'Southern-Uzbek_Arab')

Usage (HF Loader)

Replace twi_Latn with your specific language.

from datasets import load_dataset
dataset = load_dataset('cis-lmu/GlotSparse', 'twi_Latn')
print(dataset['train'][0]) # First row of Twi_Latn

Download

If you are not a fan of the HF dataloader or are just interested in a specific language, download it directly: Replace twi_Latn with your specific language.

! wget https://huggingface.co/datasets/cis-lmu/GlotSparse/resolve/main/twi_Latn/twi_Latn.csv

Sources

• Balochi (bal)

  • News: https://sunnionline.us/balochi/
  • Stories: https://kissah.org/
  • Deiverse Contents such as poems, stories, posts, etc: https://baask.com/archive/category/balochi/

• Gilaki (glk)

  • Social Media: The original source of this content is Twitter, but Twitter typically doesn't support Gilaki as part of its language identifier due to gilaki is a low resource language. We obtained this content from a Telegram channel (https://t.me/gilaki_twitter) that re-posts Gilaki Twitter content. The admins of the channel are native Gilaki speakers, and after manual inspection, these tweets are selected. At present, there isn't a readily available mapping for Twitter IDs. The primary reason for reposting Twitter content on Telegram in Iran is the relative ease of access to Telegram compared to Twitter.

• Brahui (brh)

  • News: https://talarbrahui.com/category/news/ and https://talarbrahui.com/category/articles/

• Southern-Kurdish (sdh)

  • News: https://shafaq.com/ku/ (Feyli)

• Gurani (hac)

  • News: https://anfsorani.com/هۆرامی (Hawrami)

• Kirmanjki (kiu)

  • News: https://anfkirmancki.com/

• Fanti (fat)

  • News: https://akannews.com/fante/

• Twi (twi)

  • News: https://akannews.com/asante-twi/

• South-Azerbaijani (azb)

  • News: https://www.trt.net.tr/turki/

• Southern Uzbek (uzs)

  • News: https://www.trt.net.tr/afghaniuzbek/

Tools

To compute the script of each text and removing unwanted langauges we used Glotscript (code and paper).

License

We do not own any of the text from which these data has been extracted. We license the actual packaging, the metadata and the annotations of these data under the cc0-1.0 (waiving all of the rights under copyright law).

If you are a website/dataset owner and do not want your data to be included in this corpra, please send us an email at amir@cis.lmu.de .

Ethical Considerations

1. Biases: The text corpus may reflect the perspectives, opinions, or demographics of its sources or creators. It is important for users to critically evaluate the text in context especially for news sources and social medias (e.g., sunnionline, twitter, ...).

2. Representativeness: While we have aimed for diversity and inclusivity, the text corpus may not fully represent all native speakers. Users should be mindful of any potential underrepresentation.

3. Ethics: We acknowledge that the collection and use of text data can have ethical implications. We have strived to handle the data responsibly, but we encourage users to consider the broader ethical implications of their own research or applications.

Github

We also host a GitHub version with representing similar metadata from other sources: https://github.com/cisnlp/GlotSparse

Citation

If you use any part of this code and data in your research, please cite it using the following BibTeX entry. All the sources related to news, social media, and without mentioned datasets are crawled and compiled in this work. This work is part of the GlotLID project.

@inproceedings{
  kargaran2023glotlid,
  title={{GlotLID}: Language Identification for Low-Resource Languages},
  author={Kargaran, Amir Hossein and Imani, Ayyoob and Yvon, Fran{\c{c}}ois and Sch{\"u}tze, Hinrich},
  booktitle={The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year={2023},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=dl4e3EBz5j}
}